Takeaways from Follow Your Flow Podcast: “Crafting An Effective Resume”

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(The Indonesian version of this article can be found here.)

“An unconventional approach to a fulfilling life.”

Living up to the soul of their official tagline (English version) above, Follow Your Flow dished out some insightful tips on making a resume that hit the mark — in a way that is slightly unconventional, yet, hopefully, would both add value to our professional skillsets and experience — and meet the needs of the company (or companies) we are applying to.

Hosted by Vicario Reinaldo, initiator and one of the co-founders of Follow Your Flow, and presented by Aninditta Savitry (Anin), a generalist expert with more than 20 years of experience in the field of project management, this podcast is full to the brim with interesting and enlightening bits of information about what potentially makes a “killer” resume.

Key takeaways:

Resume = Main Statement (Key Expertise +Specific Experience)+ Supporting Information (Educational + Relevant Credentials) ~ Aninditta Savitry

• Make clear distinctions between CV and resume. CV (curriculum vitae) is a summary of one’s course of life, the length of which is indefinite, and is usually used for academic purposes (scholarship, research grant proposal, etc.); while resume is, by nature, more dynamic, containing the outline of our professional experience relevant to the job being applied for. The document’s length itself is typically one page for every 10 years of experience. This resume is the one that we commonly use to apply for a job. According to Anin herself, the core of a resume is a main statement, listing our professional expertise and experience, complemented by supporting information, listing our formal educational backgrounds, certifications, and credentials relevant to our career.
• Explain our key professional skills. It can be done in list/bullet-point style or narrative style — although the bullet-point style is, as of the time of writing, still prevalent, the two hosts of the podcast remarked. Most recruitment managers have very limited time to review each of the resume from the applicants — one half of an A4 page of resume would be the generally-accepted length of the list of key skills.
• Expound our specific work experience. Instead of jotting down just our job description (e.g., translator) as it is, it would be way better if we work out in details our real work experience, (e.g., “a professional translator from English into Indonesian [and vice versa], proven able on delivering the translation of audiovisual assets and meeting the requirement of minimum loading hour of 16 hours per month”).

In a nutshell, resume is a marketing document. ~ Vicario Reinaldo

• Elaborate (and market) our biggest strengths. Avoid recording observations about ourselves that are too subjective and, objectively speaking, not readily measurable (e.g., “I’m ambitious and hard-working”, etc.). As Vicario said, resume is a marketing document. So, one of the best ways to “sell” ourselves is to market our biggest strengths with solid oomph factor (or, in Indonesian slang, “gereget”, [pronounced as “guh-ruh-guht”]) — or competitive edge (in my own case, “a professional translator who is able to translate approximately 1200 to 1500 words from English into Indonesian [and vice versa] in one working day [8 hours]; committed to delivering carefully-curated human translation that shall never let the final decisions with regard to the end product in the target language be taken by machine translation (MT) systems serving purely in a subordinate role of a human translator such as Google Translate; and adhering to the usage of the latest editions of KBBI (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia) (Indonesian Unabridged Dictionary) and PUEBI (Pedoman Umum Ejaan Bahasa Indonesia) as well the style guides tailored to each specific client in order to produce clear, accurate, and natural translation.”)
• Use attention-attracting logo and color scheme designs. According to Anin, based on the Gestalt principle, one’s perceptions of any given thing as whole tend to be shaped by individual patterns (especially visual ones) encountered by her or him. The mixing and matching of colors (e.g. yellow and black) plus proper and symmetrical layouts would have more potentials in directing the attention of the recruiters to the parts containing important points in our resume. If available, logos of the company (or companies) we previously worked with can also be employed in this context to add value to our credibility.